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🧐 Ancient Beat #178: Engineered landscapes, poison arrows, and war trumpets
A remarkable Iron Age hoard discovered near Thetford has yielded two of the rarest known Celtic military objects buried together: the most complete…
 • James Fleischmann
🎄 Ancient Beat #177: Huge undersea walls, new hominins, and the Indus Valley collapse
Here’s a wild one. It was first noticed a few years back, but a paper just got published. Off the coast of Brittany, France, near Île de Sein, divers…
 • James Fleischmann
🧐 Ancient Beat #176: Pyrotechnology, protomathematics, and pleasure boats
At a site in Suffolk, England, archaeologists found ~400,000-year-old evidence that ancient hominins weren’t just using natural fires, but making them…
 • James Fleischmann
🧐 Ancient Beat #175: Threadcraft, language, and solar-lunar observatories
A newly identified solar-aligned structure in Peru’s Casma River valley appears to predate the well-known Chankillo Solar Observatory (built around 250…
 • James Fleischmann
🧐 Ancient Beat #174: Prehistoric stories, human grammar, and apes making out
A small clay figurine from a Late Natufian site overlooking the Sea of Galilee, dated to around 10,000 BCE, depicts a crouching woman with a goose…
 • James Fleischmann
🧐 Ancient Beat #173: Cosmograms, pyramid anomalies, and the "Band of Holes"
At the site of Aguada Fénix in the Gulf lowlands of Mexico (Tabasco), dated to around 1050 BCE and built by early Maya groups, a cross-shaped pit carved…
 • James Fleischmann
🧐 Ancient Beat #172: Mathematical-ritual tools, opium, and a 100-mile journey with a 5-ton post
Around a millennium ago, scribes of the Maya civilization developed a sophisticated eclipse-prediction system using the Dresden Codex, a bark-paper…
 • James Fleischmann
🧐 Ancient Beat #171: Ritual landscapes, missing lineages, and shifts in the timeline
In central Jordan’s Murayghat region, archaeologists have uncovered a vast Early Bronze Age ritual landscape dating to roughly 3500–3000 BCE. Spread…
 • James Fleischmann
🧐 Ancient Beat #170: Scorpion mound observatories, tool making, and two sets of hunting megastructures worlds apart
An airborne laser survey on the Karst Plateau (Adriatic hinterland) uncovered four monumental dry-stone architectures (K01–K04) over ~870 km² (~336 sq…
 • James Fleischmann
🧐 Ancient Beat #169: Lost languages, psychedelic cohesion, and walking moai statues
Teotihuacan, the vast metropolis that dominated central Mexico from around 100 BCE to 600 CE, has long remained one of Mesoamerica’s great enigmas. Its…
 • James Fleischmann
🧐 Ancient Beat #168: An unexpected statue at Göbeklitepe, early usage of iron, and a skull that bridges lineages
A fossil skull, Yunxian 2, found in Hubei Province, China, and digitally reconstructed, has now been dated to ~1 million years ago. And it bridges key…
 • James Fleischmann
🧐 Ancient Beat #167: Solstice sanctuaries, standing stones, and colossal statues
A 2,500-year-old sanctuary has been uncovered at El Fontanar near Jódar in Jaén, Spain, where architecture and astronomy merged into ritual performance…
 • James Fleischmann
Ancient Beat
Ancient Beat
All the latest news about the ancient world. Curated, summarized, and sent to your inbox weekly.
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